An old lady in a Denver apartment building made me rethink my whole job

I was finishing up a basic panel swap in this old brick building last month, and the tenant next door, Mrs. Gable, came out to watch. She must have been 80. I was just tidying wires, and she said, 'You know, that little green light on my keypad is the first thing I look for when I come home. It means I'm safe.' She told me her husband installed her first system 40 years ago, and now it's just her. I've done a thousand installs, but hearing that hit different. It wasn't about the tech or the sale. It was about that one little light giving someone peace. Makes you remember what we're actually putting in these walls. Anyone else have a customer say something simple that just stuck with you for years?

3 comments

3 Comments

avery_roberts2mo ago

Feel like maybe we're reading too much into a basic job sometimes. I mean it's a green light on a keypad, not a life alert button. People get attached to weird stuff, my grandma still thinks her microwave clock being wrong is a sign of the end times. It's nice the old lady felt safe but idk, we're just putting in wires and plastic boxes. Maybe it's just me but I've never had a customer say something that deep.

hugo23620d ago

You know my dad was the exact opposite of that old lady, Avery. He worked at a newspaper press for thirty years and never once thought about what he was doing. Just came home with ink under his nails, grumbling about the machines. Then one day they shut the whole place down and he realized his entire life's work was just recycling bins and parking lot asphalt now. It took him a while to understand that people read those papers at their breakfast tables, that somebody's kid learned to read from them. He moped around the house for months.

robin4892mo ago

My buddy installed a system for a single mom who cried saying it was the first time she'd slept in years, @avery_roberts. That little plastic box meant her kid was safe.